Pulse(8)

‘Awful to die so alone,’ said PC Filippos, as if he had been reading my mind. He downed the rest of his coffee and looked at his watch. ‘Right, I must be getting along. I’ve got to get back to the racecourse. I need to check for evidence in the Gents where the man was found.’

‘What, now?’ I said. ‘Surely it will have been cleaned.’

‘It was the cleaner who found him – the poor woman was very upset. The man was in a locked lavatory cubicle and all she could see were his feet under the door. I have given instructions for the whole Gents to be left alone so I’d best go back tonight. They’ll need it available for the racing tomorrow.’

He hurried away and I went back to caring for the sick and injured, all the while thinking about the unnamed man lying on a slab just along the corridor.

I worried about my decision to administer the adenosine. Why did I do that before having the blood results back from the lab? That had been reckless of me. At best, it had hastened his death. At worst, perhaps he would have survived if I hadn’t been so foolish.

I soon convinced myself that it had been my stupidity that had killed him.

It was all my fault.

My shift ended at 2 a.m. and I drove home afterwards like a maniac.

It was a way to express the anger that was boiling within me.

I was angry with the man for dying, and angry with myself for letting it happen. But, most of all, I was angry at what had become of me – angry at this wretched depression and the way it was ruining my life.

I jumped a red light on the Evesham Road, passing straight through the junction without even braking.

It was as if I didn’t care.

And I didn’t.

On this occasion, late at night, the roads were clear and I sailed through without incident. I did it without thinking rather than as a conscious effort to kill myself. I didn’t exactly think of myself as having a death wish but, if the Grim Reaper came along and hooked me with his scythe, it wouldn’t have bothered me too much.

Maybe I was more suicidal than I realised.

But then I thought about those in another car that I might hit. I knew all too well the horrific injuries that occurred in high-speed car crashes. I spent my working life saving people from them.

I would never forgive myself if I seriously injured or killed someone else.

I slowed a fraction.

Perhaps I’d be better off just driving really fast into a nice big solid tree. That should do it.

‘Single-car accidents’, the police called them. ‘Tut-tut,’ they would say, ‘she must have gone to sleep after a long shift at the hospital. Such a shame. Such a waste.’

But Grant would have known otherwise. What would he say to the boys?

The boys!

Oh God, I couldn’t do it to them.

I slowed a bit more.

I made it home in one piece.

Home was a modern four-bedroom detached house on a new estate on the outskirts of Gotherington, a village five miles to the north of Cheltenham.

I’d had to drive past Cheltenham Racecourse on my way.

I knew it well. I regularly acted as one of the racecourse medical officers, following the horses in a Land Rover, ready to leap out and treat any jockey injured as a result of a fall.

But my mind tonight wasn’t on the track, the horses and the medical requirements; it was on the gentlemen’s toilet under the main grandstand.

I imagined the unfortunate cleaner finding the man unconscious in one of the cubicles. It must have given her quite a shock. But at least the man was then still alive.

When I’d been at medical school there had been a story going around about a man who had died while sitting on the loo. In the macabre humour of all medical students, we had laughed at the revelation that, by the time he was found, rigor mortis had set in and the ambulance crew couldn’t lay him down flat on a stretcher. He’d had to be carried to the morgue on a chair.

I pulled into the driveway and parked my little Mini Cooper next to Grant’s Audi.

That was a good sign, I thought. He’s still here.

I had an intense fear that Grant would leave me – that he would have had enough of my erratic behaviour and, one day, I would come home to find him packed and gone. I didn’t have any hard evidence to make me think that way – no unexplained telephone calls or cryptic emails – but I still worried. Sex between us had become a distant memory and I’d have probably left me by now if I’d been him.

He repeatedly tried to reassure me that he wouldn’t go but I knew that he was fed up treading around me on eggshells, saying nothing at all rather than risk uttering some throwaway line to which I would take exception.

I realised that I took even the slightest criticism straight to my heart; every cross word was a dagger in my side.

Didn’t everyone?

No, they didn’t.

I had tried hard to let things pass, to laugh them off as nothing more than mere banter between husband and wife, but God had wired my brain wrongly. I couldn’t leave things be or let them go. I would demand to know what he meant and refuse to believe his answer of ‘nothing’. It would end in tears, his or mine, and we wouldn’t speak for hours.

I quietly let myself in through the front door. The light was on in the hall but the house was quiet. I imagined Grant had allowed the boys to stay up late to watch Match of the Day but they would be asleep by now, dead to the world as only teenagers could be.